“The goose is dead,” I heard Ed Denson tell the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors. He didn’t say “the goose is gonna die if…” He said “the goose is dead.” I’ve heard a lot of that kind of talk lately, but when Ed Denson says “the goose is dead,” I believe him, because he’s the goose’s lawyer. Ed went to the supervisors to complain about the excessive county taxes on legal cannabis, but it appears that the confluence of legalization and regulation created the perfect storm for Humboldt County’s cannabis industry, otherwise known as “the goose that lays golden eggs.”

They could also call it “the goose that eats people, sucks the rivers dry, and turns the community into a ghetto,” but you know how much people around here prefer to focus on the positive. Whatever you call it, Humboldt County’s cannabis heyday is over. The price of black market cannabis collapsed last year in the face of a historic glut in supply. Meanwhile, the CA state regulators dealt the fatal blow to Humboldt’s so called “small farmers” when they decided to license grows larger than one acre. Suddenly, Humboldt County growers are too remote, too dispersed and too small to produce cannabis, competitively in the free market.

The bubble burst. Although it happened suddenly, it didn’t take a genius to see it coming. Anna Hamilton saw it coming a decade ago, and she warned everyone about it. She asked “What’s after pot?” and the community resoundingly replied, “More pot!” Unfortunately, “more pot” quickly turned into “too much pot,” leading to the current collapse in price. It’s a classic small farmer mistake, and it’s why small farmers usually struggle financially, and fail often. Today, the goose still sucks the rivers dry, and it still eats people, but it doesn’t lay golden eggs anymore.

Eventually, life as a small farmer will rehabilitate a lot of black market growers. The people who played smart, paid their land off, love it, and know how to live close to it, will survive on honest labor and thrift. For the rest of Humboldt County’s 12,000+ black market cannabis growers out there, the people who moved here to grow weed, because they thought they could make money at it, it’s just a matter of time. You can tell haw smart they are by how quickly they scram. The smart ones have already left.

A lot of growers will move on to the next sleazy scam. Don’t be surprised if you see them in the health care industry, or working for Big Pharma, but only the smart ones will make that transition seamlessly. Most of Humboldt County growers will not respond well to the economic downturn. Generations of living the low-status, highly secretive, life of a black market drug dealer left us with limited skills, substance abuse problems and chronically low self-esteem, issues we could always cover up, when we had plenty of money. Without money, it’s gonna be a bitch.

A lot of people still don’t know what hit them. They will crumble along with the black market cannabis industry here in Humboldt County. Broken-down cars will continue to accumulate on broken-down homesteads, occupied by broken-down people who have no idea what else to do. We won’t see quite so many big shiny new trucks in town, or cocky young men driving them. Instead, we’ll see more hollow, addicted and despondent young men, hitchhiking and asking for help. We’ll all feel the pinch, but it will be worse for some parts of Humboldt County than it will be for others.

Arcata will be fine. They took steps to run black market growers out of their residential neighborhoods years ago. They also have the college and a strong arts community that will all help buffer and mitigate the impacts of economic upheaval. McKinleyville seems to have inherited most of Arcata’s old indoor grows, and problems, which they are likely to see more of. Eureka and Fortuna have enough economic diversity to withstand the shock, if people, especially in Eureka, could learn to be more humane to each other.

Life up in rural North East Humboldt has always been pretty hardscrabble, and will remain so, but here in Southern Humboldt, where the black market cannabis industry choked out most of our economic diversity decades ago, we will feel the impacts of this collapse most acutely. Despite Anna Hamilton’s warnings, we remain ill prepared for it. Here, instead of facing reality, and preparing for the inevitable, we put our energy into cultivating a mythology about ourselves as growers of superior cannabis, in a region narrowly suited to it. Unfortunately, that myth only fooled us.

The goose has become a liability. Our dream of becoming the Napa County of cannabis just got buried in bushels of bud from Bakersfield. Now, it’s about survival. It’s about recovery. It’s about reality. For the first time in a long time, we’ll have the financial poverty to match our cultural poverty. Ultimately, that’s a good thing. When you build culture, it attracts money, which brings prosperity. A fountain of money, on the other hand, divorced from culture, breeds dependence and weakens communities. It’s time we got back to building culture, here in Southern Humboldt, instead of just growing money.

At long last, I can buy marijuana, legally, here in California. I don’t need a note from my doctor, and I don’t have to pretend to be sick. I can walk into a store, admire their selection of fine cannabis products, and if I have enough money, and I can prove that I’m over 21 years of age, I can buy my choice of them, without having to look over my shoulder to see if there’s a cop around. I’ve waited a really long time for this. I’ve been dreaming of this day since 1978, and working for it since 1988, but I guess I’ll have to wait a few more days.

I had hoped that I would not have to drive far to visit one of these new recreational cannabis retailers on January 1st. People around here like to call Southern Humboldt County “the Heart of the Emerald Triangle,” but unfortunately, the two venders seeking retail recreational cannabis licenses in Southern Humboldt are still not quite open for business. When I inquired of the Humboldt County Cannabis Chamber of Commerce as to where I could find the nearest recreational cannabis retailer in my area, they refered me to a list compiled by Leafly.com, listing all of the cannabis retailers in the state that have registered with them to be open on January 1st.

I only found one retailer on that list in Humboldt County, EcoCann in Oldtown Eureka. I had never heard of them before, but a couple of days later, I found their circular in the North Coast Journal, offering preroll joints for one dollar, one per customer, with coupon. It’s about 80 miles from our place in Ettersburg to Oldtown, a long way to drive, and a lot of money in gas for a one dollar joint, especially considering that all of my friends and neighbors have tons of weed, and I can hardly go to town without someone giving a wad of buds for free.

Still, I want to buy weed, legally, in a licensed store. Well, not exactly weed, but I want to buy some cannabis products. I have weed. Everyone I know has weed. If I was out of weed, I would buy weed in the store. Hell, if I was out of weed, I would’ve driven to the store on New Years Eve and camped out overnight so that I could be their first customer on New Year’s Day, but I’ve got plenty of weed, so it can wait a few more days until we need to make a trip up North.

On Jan 5, I have an appointment in Trinidad to record a couple of segments for my KMUD radio show: Monday Morning Magazine. I think I’ll visit the dispensary then, and turn my visit to EcoCann into a segment as well. Celebrating legal cannabis will be the cover story of the show, which will air on KMUD (streaming and archived at www.kmud.org) on January 8, from 7-9am, about the time this post drops on LoCO. We will talk a lot about this new world we call legalization with a live panel of local entrepreneurs who have set sail to discover it, including Graham Shaw, Holly Carter, Kevin Jodrey and Lelehnia Dubois.

I’m really excited about this. I feel like a kid anticipating his first trip to the candy store. It’s been years since I had a medical recommendation, and when I did go to the trouble of getting a medical recommendation, it was only because I had shitloads of weed, and felt I needed the legal protection. Once, at Wonderland Nursery in Redway, I used my medical marijuana card to buy a bottle of Golden Dragon Medicinal Syrup for my mom, who has Parkinson’s disease, but other than that, I’ve never shopped for cannabis at a dispensary before.

The circular from EcoCann tells me they have quite a few strains of fresh cannabis flower for sale, and the pictures of the buds look pretty nice, but I’ve got plenty of flowers. Right now, I’m more interested in some of the new, value added, cannabis products that you only find at a a legal dispensary. Last year, I sent my mother a box of chocolates from the Humboldt Chocolate Company behind the gazebo in Oldtown. My mother, naturally, assumed that anything that had “Humboldt” in the name, must be infused with cannabis, and that’s what she told her friends, when she shared those, very delicious, but non-medicated, truffles with them. Of course, they all thought they got high from them. I would like to give my mother some chocolates that really will get her and her friends high, and I’ll bet they have them at EcoCann.

For myself, I’d like to find a way to ingest cannabis that doesn’t harsh my vocal chords as much as smoking, and that doesn’t involve sugar, and I’m sure my girlfriend would appreciate it if I didn’t stink the house up with smoke so much. I might want to try a vape pen, and I’ve heard great things about a cannabis throat spray.

I still find it hard to believe that I no longer have to feel paranoid about carrying weed (but I probably will, for the rest of my life), and I can go to a licensed store to buy it, even if it takes two hours to get there. So much has changed in forty rears, mostly for the worst, but this change is long overdue. Really, it’s about time.

Next month, recreational cannabis becomes legal in California, and Californians will no longer have to pretend to be sick to legally grow their own weed, or shop at a dispensary. That’s going to be a big day, and I intend to celebrate it. Here in Humboldt County, where we so desperately want to be recognized as the cannabis capital of the world, I think we should do our best to pretend like we’re happy about it too.

We need to think about how it looks to cannabis consumers when we grumble about legalization. Grumbling about legalization tells consumers that we wish they still had to pay Drug War prices for weed, and that we don’t give a fuck how many of them have to go to jail to make it happen. That’s not really the image we want to project to the newly liberated cannabis consumers of California. Instead, we need to treat cannabis legalization as a momentous occasion. Despite the terrible job they did of it all, this really is a giant step forward towards complete legalization at the federal level.

If we, here in Humboldt County, want to compete in the legal market, claim a strong market share, we need bright shining happy faces eager to serve an empowered customer with many new choices. The days of sitting tight and acting cool are over. You need to get consumers’ attention. You need to show them that you have something more to offer, and that you will go the extra mile for them. It’s a brand new ballgame, and we need to play ball.

I don’t think people will come here just to see a pot farm, though. Nobody goes to Iowa to watch corn grow, even though we all love popcorn. I think we should learn a lesson from Anheiser-Busch. They recognized that a brewery, by itself, only attracts beer-drinkers, but if you throw in a sky-ride, a water-slide, and a talking parrot show, you’ve got entertainment for the whole family and you’ve created a magical situation that allows dad to spend quality time with the family and get plowed all at the same time. And so, Busch Garden’s the world’s first beer themed family theme park was born, and eventually grew into one of Florida’s major tourist attractions.

I think we need something like that, here in Humboldt County, for weed. Call it Ganjaland, or Weed-World, or Marijuanaville. Put in a sky-ride where the gondolas look like CAMP helicopters, and we can have the only water-slide in America with live salmon in it. We could have a scary roller-coaster called “The Headrush” and if we got all of our local Samba bands, belly-dancers and burlesque troops involved we’d have more than enough entertainment. Throw in some virtual reality games and hypnotic psychedelic light shows, and you’ve got something that will bring families from around the globe.

Of course, you’d need lots of music. What would weed be without music? What would music be without weed? We could divide the park into little theme villages depending on what kind of music you would hear there. For instance, you might go to “Da Hood” to hear hip-hop and rap, or “The Ranch” for C+W, maybe “Trenchtown” for Reggae or “Dead Phish Lake” for all of the jam-bands. Each theme village would have it’s own attractions, as well as food vendors and cannabis specialties.

You could sell jerk chicken on a stick, coconut with lime, and fat spliffs of ganja in “Trenchtown.” You could enjoy burgers and fries, and longneck Coors and Budweisers, with a big chaw of cannabis dip between your cheek and gum at The Rance. In “Da Hood” we’d have blunts, 40s and mac n cheese, and at Dead Phish lake you can get sushi, or a veggie burrito to go with your microbrew, while you poke a kind nug into the bowl of your favorite piece of art glass.

In Tommorowland, all you’ll hear are the anguished wails of future generations, so no one wants to go there. Instead, we’ll have “Yesterdayland,” where you can’t take your phone, and park employees, dressed as NYPD cops usher you into a carriage that looks like the backseat of a squad car, for a ride that simulates the trip to Rikers Island. When you finally get off of that ride, more park employees, dressed as your parents, smoking cigarettes and sipping cocktails, will tell you how disappointed they are in you, and men in lab coats will chase you around asking you to pee in a cup.

Probably nobody really wants to go to Yesterdayland either, so let’s just keep it all in the here and now, and celebrate this milestone for what it is, a tidal shift in the War on Drugs. Things will never be the same again. This is the beginning of a whole new world of opportunity for anyone with the imagination and drive to challenge the unknown, but it is also the end of an era.

The War on Drugs is like the Vietnam War in that way. Some people made a lot of money off of it, a lot of people lost their lives in it, but all of us were affected by it. Even though that era was a dark stain on our history, a lot of people will miss it, and many people will have trouble adjusting to life without it. For now, let’s try to see it from the cannabis consumer’s point of view. Monday, January 1st is beautiful new day. It is a day to stand tall and breathe free, so let’s all stand tall, breathe free, and celebrate the freedom to enjoy our favorite herb, on our own terms, for our own reasons, legally, for the first time in 80 years. It’s really about time.

I know we need drug treatment options here in Humboldt County, and probably a corporate chain-store methadone clinic is better than nothing, but I can’t help but think that this new Aegis clinic is what they plan to give us instead of affordable housing. Not that long ago 2nd District Supervisor Estelle Fennell toured homeless encampments in Southern Humboldt with law enforcement. Afterwards, when she spoke to the press, she didn’t say, “Wow, look at all of these people living outside, I guess we really need more housing here in SoHum.” Instead, she said something like, “It sure seems like a lot of the people living outside in the rain and cold have drug problems, I guess we need more drug treatment.”

We got the same story from the Humboldt County Human Rights Commission. All year we asked the HRC to pressure the Board of Supervisors to declare a shelter emergency so that we could create some safe, affordable housing, and address the growing problem of vigilante violence against the poor and homeless here in SoHum. After more than a year of hounding willfully ignorant and purposefully dense politicians and political operatives about this, I finally got a call from HRC Commissioner Lance Morton to come talk about solutions.

So I make another special trip to town to meet with them, to talk about these alleged “solutions,” and the first words out of his mouth were, “We’re going to have drug treatment on demand!”

None of us had asked for drug treatment on demand. We went to all of those stupid meetings to demand that something be done about housing. We asked for affordable housing. We asked for tiny house villages. We asked for low-cost campgrounds and we asked for shelters. We also asked for respect for our human rights, and equal protection under the law, but instead, they bring us a methadone clinic.

None of my friends have problems with hard drugs. None of my friends can afford hard drugs. All of the heroin and Oxycontin addicts I know live in houses, and most of them own land, or their family owns land. My friends don’t need drug treatment; we all need affordable housing. None of us have very good housing options, and a lot of us have simply learned to do without.

Again and again we take our grievance to the Board of Supervisors and County Government. We explain the situation until we are blue in the face, and they look at us like they live on Mars and have no idea what we are talking about. After a couple of years of this, they come back and say, “Oh, we see what you mean, but you must be high on drugs if you think we give a fuck about your housing situation. Here’s a corporate chain-store methadone clinic for you.”

For us, Aegis will be just another shitty job that doesn’t pay a living wage. For the drug-addicted gentry of Humboldt County, however, who managed to support their hard drug habit for years, by growing cannabis and selling it on the black market, they can now get methadone treatment, close to home, at the taxpayers expense, through MediCal. Aegis will be an out-patient treatment center, and the only people likely to benefit from out-patient treatment are people who have homes to go home to, after treatment. How convenient! Politicians provide treatment options for addicted dope yuppies, while they heap the stigma of addiction on the poor and homeless. It doesn’t get much sleazier than that.

I found it both disingenuous and insulting to hear HRC Commissioner Lance Morton promote this new treatment center as a solution to the housing crisis. I’m sick and tired of of having my time and energy wasted by willfully ignorant politicians and political operatives who refuse to care about the real needs of poor and working people within this community. I’m even more sick of the heartless greed, punitive hostility and outright violence from the segment of our population who put those assholes on the Board of Supervisors in the first place.

The ugliness on display when someone throws a Molotov cocktail at a man sleeping in the doorway of a church, is a thousand times worse than the pitiful image of a poor man sleeping out in the cold. A poor person sleeping in the doorway of a church says “a man needs help.” Poor people sleeping outside, everywhere, says something else. It means there’s been a disaster, an earthquake, fire, flood, or economic upheaval. We had an economic upheaval. We’re beyond that now.

Today we have people sleeping everywhere, and we pay highly trained and heavily armed warriors to harass and evict them from anywhere they try to hide. Besides that, a segment of our population is not satisfied with the level of violence that our law enforcement officers meet out against them, so they form vigilante gangs that beat crippled old men to death, and set people on fire while they sleep. This is something else entirely.

Today, in Humboldt County, we’re looking at something like Apartheid, or an occupation, or Jim Crow. We’re looking at something much uglier than a natural disaster, and a thousand times uglier than a poor man who needs help. Here, the fascist business-class sends well financed, heavily armed warriors to beat-down and intimidate bedraggled, disorganized, traumatized, and addicted human beings who have committed no crimes, but have nowhere to hide and lack the strength to fight. These poor souls have no idea how to respond to the situation they find themselves in, and their only weapons against this oppression are the garbage and feces they leave behind and their own appearance.

That’s that’s all that’s left of humanity. That’s all that hasn’t been bought off or taken over by vicious, insatiable, fascistic greed. That’s what’s so ugly about what we see going on here in Humboldt County, and around the country, for that matter, and that’s why it’s so hard to look at it. Seeing desperate people on the streets reminds us of how much of our own humanity we’ve already sacrificed to participate in this whole exploitative system. This system kills us inside, but we can’t face what it’s doing to us, our planet, and our children’s future, so we take our resentments out on anyone who can’t, or won’t, get with the program.

We’ve constructed a perfectly exploitative culture that consumes our lives and destroys the planet, but instead of resisting, and standing up to it ourselves, we help the fascists wage war against humanity, profit from that war, and jeer at, beat down, and fire-bomb our broken brothers and sisters while the fascist system grinds them to dust. That’s a special kind of ugly, and it is definitely the ugliest thing about Humboldt County. Nobody wants to see that, and nobody wants their kids to see that, but here in Humboldt County, we have no shame.

We’ve done pretty well, here in Humboldt County, at keeping the big chain stores at bay. Arcata has an ordinance against them, and public outcry keeps Walmart cowering in the back of the mall. Obviously we value our local culture, and our local economy. However, our State Senator, Mike McGuire has gone ahead and invited a new big chain store to open a franchise here in Humboldt County, and he expects us to be happy about it.

At a recent “Opioid Crisis” themed town meeting, Senator McGuire announced that Aegis Treatment Centers would be opening its 32nd drug treatment clinic here in Humboldt County. Clearly we need more drug treatment here in Humboldt County, but do we really need the “Taco Bell” of treatment centers? Has Aegis been offered incentives to locate here in Humboldt County? Were those incentives also offered to the Open Door Clinic who has been treating everyone’s medical needs here for decades? What about our local health care districts, or Redwoods Rural Health Center? Were they offered incentives to offer drug treatment locally? Do we need a big company from out of town to suck money out of our community, just so we can have a methadone clinic in Humboldt County?

If you think I’m kidding about the “Taco Bell of treatment centers,” you should look into Aegis for yourself. Aegis pays low wages, overworks it’s staff, and has a very high turnover rate. The employee reviews of the company that I read shared a few common themes. Nearly everyone complained of the low pay, many mentioned the high case load, and most complained about the lack of opportunity for advancement. Even employees who rated Aegis highly, said that it was “a good place to start,” but not a good place to work long-term.

Patients complain of inflexibility, impersonal, constantly changing staff, and many complain that Aegis likes to keep people on Methadone, because it’s more profitable to maintain someone on methadone than it is to help them quit opiates altogether. We’ve been treating narcotic addiction with methadone for decades, but it has never worked very well. I’m not sure we’ve ever had an outpatient methadone clinic in Humboldt County before, but couldn’t we do this better ourselves?

A couple of weeks ago I interviewed Dr Amanda Reiman, who lives in Mendocino County, for my radio show, Monday Morning Magazine on KMUD (Nov 13, 8-9am archived at http://www.kmud.org). Dr Reiman has done some very interesting research into the therapeutic benefits of cannabis within the harm reduction drug treatment model. Dr Reiman has found that cannabis helps people quit hard drugs, and cannabis helps people who use hard drugs, use less hard drugs. This is a significant breakthrough in addiction treatment, and here in Humboldt County, we should be on the cutting edge of cannabis aided addiction treatment research. That sure won’t happen at an Aegis methadone clinic.

Dr Reiman works with a treatment clinic in southern California called “High Sobriety,” which uses cannabis alongside other forms of treatment. Why shouldn’t we have our own, homegrown, cannabis enhanced, drug treatment clinic here in Humboldt County? We need more and better drug treatment here in Humboldt County. We have plenty of people who need help. We have plenty of cannabis, and we have the peace, quiet and serenity that people need to heal.

We have an epidemic of addiction and overdose deaths here in Humboldt County that we must address, and if there’s one thing we should know by now, it is that we will never arrest and jail our way out of this problem. The people who are addicted to drugs in Humboldt County are our neighbors, our friends, and our kids. We don’t need to give them criminal records, and we don’t need to farm them out to some assembly line methadone clinic for the rest of their lives.

We have a unique population, and a unique set of circumstances here in Humboldt County, and I think we need a unique, homegrown approach to drug treatment. Research into the therapeutic potential for cannabis in drug treatment should be a high priority because we desperately need more and better drug treatment options. We need every tool in the toolbox to help the people of our community recover from the War on Drugs.

If there is one thing we can learn from Aegis, that is, that there is money to be made in drug treatment here in Humboldt County. Besides that, you can bet that people who use cannabis to quit hard drugs, will find that cannabis helps them stay clean, too, and people who used Humboldt Cannabis to get clean will probably use Humboldt Cannabis to stay clean. The potential for brand loyalty is enormous. This idea will make people rich. You’re welcome.

What a difference a couple of years can make. Suddenly, SoHum seems to be sinking. The Mateel is broke. KMUD is on the brink, and the business district in Garberville has a hockey player’s smile. No one has moved into Paul’s bookstore since he got evicted. No one has moved into the previous location of Paul and Kathy’s bookstore, in Redway, since their previous eviction almost a decade ago, but getting back to Garberville. The restaurant at the North end of town seems to be the latest gap in our grill. The House of Burgess Restaurant is now closed, and empty. Across the street, the ice cream shop, Treats, has been closed for a couple of years now. The big theater next to it hasn’t shown a movie since 2016. Across the street again, the bank in the next block of Redwood Drive is closed, and everyone else seems like they’re just barely hanging on.

The Chamber of Commerce keeps organizing street parties, and they’ve made feeble attempts to revive Arts Alive, but Garberville’s illicit sparkle is gone. The bling, has blung, leaving just another poor small rural town with a big drug problem. Weed has lost it’s intrigue, along with it’s profit margin, reducing the whole sexy outlaw industry into little more than hard, boring, farm work that barely pays the bills. Say goodbye to the Napa County of fine marijuana, and say hello to the new Southern Ohio of the West Coast.

The easy money is gone, and growing marijuana gets closer to honest farm work every day, and honestly, honest farm work sucks. I’ve done it. I respect the people who do it, but I hope I never have to do it again. I’m not a farm guy. I don’t mind growing my own weed, so I can get high while I do my thing, but my thing is not farming.

I think that if we, here in this community, can be honest with ourselves, most of us will realize that we are not farm people. The people who I met when I first moved here, were not farmers. They grew pot, but they also painted, made pottery, played music and made art. They didn’t move here with a burning desire to grow the very best marijuana in the world, and a shitload of it. They moved here to get away from the rat race. They grew cannabis to pay their bills, and to buy time to pursue what they loved, be it quality time in nature, their propensity for other drugs, or their own art, music or craft. They called it “The Cannabis Grant.”

I’m sure that some of the people who grow cannabis around here, do it because they love growing weed, and they never get tired of it, because growing weed is what they were born to do. That’s not most of us though. Most of us were looking for a way to avoid long hours of hard work. Growing marijuana was a way of stealing your life back from the man. People grew marijuana so that they could enjoy a comfortable lifestyle without selling themselves into corporate slavery. Growing pot was stressful, and it wasn’t easy, but it didn’t consume your whole life.

Today, most people in the business are working themselves to death on a non-stop light-dep treadmill to hell. The artists and writers and oddball misfits who grew marijuana to buy some autonomy and freedom are getting squeezed, and for people in the industry, growing marijuana is rapidly becoming just another shitty job. This is not the time to let your talents and your dreams languish while you toil away your life in Humboldt’s ganja fields. Get out while you can. You have better things to do.

Don’t measure your success in dollars, because dollars mean nothing. Measure your success in happiness; measure it in time spent doing what you love. Whether it’s playing the guitar, talking with friends, painting, hunting, fishing, gardening, working on cars, writing, partying or fucking, nothing you can buy will ever make up for what you lose by giving up what you love. When you deny your own talents and proclivities that way, you rob the world of your creativity, which makes the whole human experience that much less interesting.

When a lot of people deny themselves what they love, for an irresistible monetary incentive, it deadens the whole community, because people who deny themselves what they really love, for money, die inside. They die inside, and they become resentful of anyone who has the courage to live their dream and do what they love. This community resentment gets translated into words and actions that beat people down spiritually. Here in SoHum, we find ourselves caught in a spiral, where the lower the price of weed falls, the harder we work. The harder we work, the more resentful we become, and the more resentful we become, the more we beat each other down.

Our whole economy is built to beat people down, and to force them to abandon their dreams and sell themselves for money. Capitalism needs people who are dead inside, because people who are dead inside buy more crap, take more drugs, go to the doctor more often, and do what they are told. When you sell yourself for money, it’s like surrendering without a fight. It is the most debilitating kind of defeat, and no amount of financial success can mitigate that loss.

The strength, and future, of SoHum does not lie with the cannabis industry. The strength and future of SoHum lies with the many talented and creative people who are getting the life squeezed out of them in the cannabis industry, and are being beaten down spiritually by a resentful community. One of the things that makes cannabis so attractive is the creativity it can release in the user, but one of the worst things about the cannabis industry is all of the creativity it squashes with never-ending hard farm work.

As a community, we need to recognize that the cannabis industry will employ fewer people in the future, and a lot of those people will be low wage workers. Most of the honest jobs in our local economy pay low wages. If we can figure out how to create housing and establish businesses that cater to the needs of people with low wage jobs, and make life easier for people at the lower end of the pay scale, we can create an environment where people feel less pressure to stick with an unsatisfying job, and more freedom to try something different. The more we can do to help release the creativity that is already here, the faster we can build an attractive local culture and a vibrant, diverse and resilient local economy. Honestly, it’s about time.

I used to write about stuff like this more often when I first started my blog (1, 2, 3 ), but it seems like time to get back to basics. Here’s the story behind “private property:”

Here in Humboldt County, we take private property very seriously. We talk about “property rights” as though they were sacred principles, while we trample human and civil rights as if the Bill of Rights, and the UN Declaration of Human Rights, were just yesterday’s newspaper. One might be surprised by how wholeheartedly we embrace this idea of “private property,” when you consider just how recently the concept was imposed on this area.

300 years ago, there was no private property in Humboldt County. There were plenty of people here, but no title deeds, no “No Trespassing” signs, and no Sheriff’s deputies, courts or lawyers, and by all accounts, life was pretty good here, 300 years ago. The story of how private property came to Humboldt County is not a pretty one. It’s a story that most property owners around here would be ashamed to tell, and should be ashamed to tell, were they to tell it truthfully, which they don’t often do. It’s a shameful story because it involved so much heartless, vicious, violence and blood-lust, and because few of us want to admit that we could be related to, or even have financial dealings with, the monsters who carried out such atrocities.

The story of how “private property” came to Humboldt County is not unique. All around the world, where “private property” is honored, there is a legacy of brutal, monstrous violence upon which it was founded, and in which lies it’s only authority. Here in Humboldt County, only about one-quarter of the households residing in the county, can realistically afford private property on which to live. Three quarters of us are just shit-out-of-luck. This is also reflected globally. More than half the people in the whole world do not own private property, or “real” property if you prefer, and have no chance of ever doing so, while a tiny minority, like 1% of the worlds population, owns more than half of it. Every year, the percentage of private property in the hands of that tiny minority, increases, while the amount available to the rest of the planet’s growing population, decreases.

So, why do people continue to honor this system of private property, even though it works so poorly for the majority of us? There is only one answer to that question. Violence. All of those past monstrosities, must be backed up with day to day violence to maintain the system, and the threat of more violence to come, insures that people continue to honor this violently imposed system of private property. Armies, navies, armies of cops, prisons, courts, lawyers, and the whole modern arsenal of lethal weaponry all exist, primarily, to inspire and maintain respect for private property.

There is nothing moral or right about private property at all. People honor the system because they don’t want to get arrested and thrown in jail, or shot, and mothers teach their children to honor it, because they don’t want their kids to go to jail or get shot, or because, by luck of birth, the child is born into one of those privileged families, who own private property, and for whom the system of private property works very nicely, thank you very much. Either way, I don’t see how you could possibly make a moral case to defend it.

I know a lot of fundamentalist Christians who have done their best to do so, but in order to buy their baloney, you have to believe their fairy tales. You have to accept “God’s” word that he gave us “dominion” over the Earth, and you have to accept that “dominion” means “the right to rape, pillage and dissect.” I don’t buy it. If God had intended us to have private property, he would have given Moses a stack of title deeds instead of the 10 Commandments.

I reject their moral authority and discount their fairy tales, despite their popularity. In my eyes, private property is morally indefensible, as well it should be in yours too, but hey, let’s be scientific about it.

If Global Warming is an “Inconvenient Truth.” Private property is the convenient lie that made it possible and necessary. Private property turns the community of life into resources, and licenses their extraction and exploitation. Private property butchers integrated ecosystems slashing them with arbitrary property lines, which then become real fences and roads that divide and fragment habitat, and displace wild plants and animals.

People borrow money to purchase private property, and then extract and sell off the natural abundance of the land to pay the interest on the loan, so the owner is left with depleted land, and a title deed that declares that the Sheriff will defend his right to possess that depleted land, with violence, against all trespassers, provided the owner pays his taxes. Then the owner must find a way to produce something, on that land, that he can sell for enough money to pay whatever taxes the Sheriff demands, which then further depletes the land’s natural abundance, and drives displaced species who once thrived there, into extinction. In other words, when you look at it scientifically, you will discover that the concept and practice of private property is profoundly dysfunctional, from an ecological perspective.

I assume that none of this is new to you. You know the awful history of this place. You understand how private property works, and you have some awareness of the environmental crisis. By now you must see the moral bankruptcy, social injustice and ecological dysfunction of it. How can you say that any of it is right? You understand what’s legal within this system, but there’s nothing right about it. In fact, this system is killing us and destroying the planet because the system is wrong, dead wrong. It is very important that you understand that.

The same logic applies to intellectual property, in fact the concept of intellectual property was built on the morally bankrupt, socially unjust, and ecologically dysfunctional idea that everything on Earth, including our thoughts and ideas, can and should be commodified and sold to the highest bidder. Applying the violence of private property, to our ideas doesn’t make it a better idea. It is simply a method of enslaving our minds in the same way that it enslaves the world.

There has been a propaganda campaign to convince us that intellectual property rights protect struggling artists, but just the opposite is true. Most artists who make money from images you see on the internet, do not own those images. By the time you see them, those images have already been sold to corporations and business interests who dominate the media and use that system of private property to extract work from artists, before anyone has a chance to see it.

Artists, sell that work to those business interests because they need the money to pay their rent, and because the artist knows that no one but their immediate friends and family will ever see their work otherwise. Intellectual property rights were not designed to protect artists, or to prevent people from stealing artist’s work. Intellectual property rights were designed to prevent artists from selling their own work, again, to a different buyer. It was designed to allow capitalists to extract works of art from artists and exploit them for their own profit, without competition from the artists themselves.

This is why artists should be very careful not to assert their intellectual property rights on moral grounds. When an artist asserts his intellectual property rights on moral grounds, he also asserts the moral, just and sacred right of his landlord to hold the Earth beneath his feet, hostage, and to charge him for every footprint and shadow he casts upon it. I don’t know many artists who believe that. Hell, I don’t know many people who believe that, besides those who also own enough private real property to to feel invested in the whole rotten system, and choose to remain in denial about it.

I do not mean to say that artists should not exercise their intellectual property rights. Not at all. If you are an artists, and see some benefit to exercising your intellectual property rights as enumerated in the legal code, by all means do so, but do it for aesthetic reasons, political reasons, economic reasons or even petty personal reasons. Don’t do it on moral grounds or try to stand on principle about it, because the principle is wrong, dead wrong.

What People Say:

If you haven't read john hardin's blog before, prepare to be shocked. I always am. (I can't help but enjoy it though...at least when I'm not slapping my hands on my computer desk and yelling at him.) He's sort of a local Jon Stewart only his writing hurts more because it is so close to people and places I love. Kym Kemp
...about, On The Money, The Collapsing Middle Class
... I think he really nails it, the middle class is devolving back into the working class. Pretty brilliant, IMO. Juliet Buck, Vermont Commons http://www.vtcommons.org/blog/middle-class-or-first-world-subsistence
BLOGS WE WATCH: John Hardin’s humorous, inappropriate, and sometimes antisocial SoHum blog is a one-of-a-kind feast or famine breadline banquet telling it like it is—or at least how it is through Mr. Hardin’s uniquely original point of view with some off-the-wall poetic licensing and colorful pics tossed in for good measure. For example, how it all went from this to that and how it all came about like the hokey pokey with your right foot out. You get the idea. Caution: this isn’t for everybody, especially those without a bawdy, bawdry, and tacky sense of humor. You know who you are. We liked it. (From the Humboldt Sentinel http://humboldtsentinel.com/2011/12/16/weekly-roundup-for-december-16-2011/)